Brian Moore’s Fergus: A Baudrillardian Reading

Abstract

Postmodern literature is founded upon the assumption that the symbolic order of the pre-capitalist era has been transformed
by mass media and information technologies into a society inundated with decontextualized signs. Fragmentation of authentic meanings,
eclipse of real objects by ‘hyperreality’ and dissolution of subjectivity, identity and religion are grounded, according to Jean Baudrillard, in
the contemporary ‘semiurgic’ culture. The present paper aims at examining the applicability of Baudrillard’s ideas concerning the
dominant cultural atmosphere in the postmodern era to Brian Moore’s Fergus (1970). In Moore’s novel a consumerist society is
delineated in which the infinitely reproduced objects and commodities threaten the individuality and identity of modern man. Besides, the
novel depicts a world in which the ‘auratic’ value of art, human relations and religion are replaced by their simulated counterparts.